Full disclosure...I didn't use many clams in the seafood paella I prepared for yesterday's dinner because we don't much care for them. Basically, I include a slight handful, more for the added taste they impart to the dish than for relishing the clams themselves. But that dish that I usually include in a wintertime menu, not one for summer's warm season, certainly pleased our palates last night. There wasn't much to scrape off our dishes; in fact, nothing. And the freshly sliced Niagara-area peaches and apricots went down very well afterward.

We woke to a perfect morning today. The air felt cleansed thanks to all the rain, the sun was out and the fragrance of a summer garden that wafted into the house was perfect. Poking about in the backyard it soon became evident that all that rain and the sun that followed soon after each episode was responsible not only for renewed activity in the garden -- roses beginning to rebloom, and the smaller and younger of our two magnolia trees in the backyard was acquiring another blush of large, pink blossoms.

That's the upside, the downside is the proliferation of weeds. Weeds everywhere, in the garden, in the grass, despite regularly digging them up. Spent perennials are crying out to be trimmed and so are the shrubs and trees; we're beginning to walk through the weeping mulberry, not under it now, thanks to great spurts of growth. So,the plan was that I'd get out some time in the afternoon and do some tidying up.

Before that, and after breakfast there's always plenty to do in the house; making up the bed, cleaning the bathroom and the powder room, dry-mopping the kitchen floor. And of course, the Friday baking. Last night I spent a little while pitting cherries. They're available now in abundance at sale prices and with just two of us there's always enough that we don't eat as is, to fill a pie. Irving did the Friday vacuuming and showed me the full cup of grey fluff the new heavy-duty stick vacuum had sucked up leaving us scratching our heads, WHERE does it all come from?!!

By the time we were both finished, the sun had been overtaken by clouds. And by the time we walked up the street to enter the ravine for our afternoon circuit, there were once again warning rumbles. Which meant a short circuit was in order, in the hope that we could get through before a thunderstorm struck. Soon there were a few sprinkles, and Irving shrugged them off ... we'd have plenty of time he said, and this time it was my turn to shrug ... at his complacency.

But on hot days like this where the temperature was supposed to soar to 30C, getting a bit wet could be a relief, and on we forged, Jackie and Jillie only too willing to spurt ahead. Finally, as we neared the pollinating meadow on this shortest of circuits there was good reason to pick up the pace, light rain, the precursor to a serious rainfall promised by overhead thumps began penetrating the humid, still air. Of course the raindrops got progressively more plump and landed with greater certainty minute by minute.

By the time we reached home we were wet, but not soaked. And once ensconced in the garage, peering out at the rain from its dark interior, it was clear we were lucky to have escaped the full force of another deluge. As for my afternoon plan to tidy up the gardens and do some needed cut-backs? Well, that'll be for another day when these daily pop-up thunderstorms take a rest.